No word on whether it'll speak like Trump.

The president hasn't directly targeted the nascent industry, but his clean energy rollbacks could hurt it.

Trump draws a line.

The billionaire appears to be trying to walk back from his clash with the president.

On Thursday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued against a proposed 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation in a New York Times opinion piece, calling the measure shortsighted and overbroad as Congress considers including it in President Trump's tax policy bill. Anthropic makes Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT.

Amodei warned that AI is advancing too fast for such a long freeze, predicting these systems "could change the world, fundamentally, within two years; in 10 years, all bets are off."

As we covered in May, the moratorium would prevent states from regulating AI for a decade. A bipartisan group of state attorneys general has opposed the measure, which would preempt AI laws and regulations recently passed in dozens of states.

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On May 23, President Trump issued an executive order entitled "Restoring Gold Standard Science." And, in news that may surprise our readers, it sounds remarkably good, focusing on issues like reproducibility and conflicts of interest. While there were a few things that could be phrased better, when it comes to basic scientific practices, the language was remarkably reasonable.

So, why didn't we report on what appeared to be a rare bit of good news? I'd considered doing so, but the situation is complicated by the fact that the order is structured in a way that makes it very sensitive to who's responsible for implementing it, a situation that's subtle enough that I couldn't figure out how to handle it well. Fortunately, I only had to wait a week for a member of the Trump administration to show just how dangerous it could be and highlight its biggest problem.

On Sunday, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary appeared on one of the weekend news programs, where he was asked about the decision to limit pregnant people's access to the COVID-19 vaccines. The host mentioned that aggregation of studies involving a total of over 1.8 million women had shown the vaccine was safe and effective.

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Impossible Metals, a deep-sea mining startup, submitted a formal request to the Department of the Interior to sell leases to mine the ocean floor.

The Trump administration's steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several climate-related programs Thursday.

Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database for vague reasons. Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation's most devastating weather events, critically pooling various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public.

In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that's a conservative estimate. Considering that CNN noted the average number of disasters in the past five years jumped from nine annually to 24, shutting down the database could leave communities in the dark on costs of emerging threats. All the NOAA can likely say is to continue looking at the historic data to keep up with trends.

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has reportedly overhauled a historically wonky Department of Defense-designed tool that automates layoffs of federal workers.

Expected to expedite DOGE's already rushed efforts to shrink the government, the redesigned software could make it easier for DOGE to quickly dismantle the biggest agencies in a blink, sources familiar with the revamp told Reuters.

Developed more than two decades ago, AutoRIF (short for automated reductions in force) was deemed too "clunky" to use across government, sources told Reuters. In a 2003 audit, the DOD's Office of the Inspector General noted, for example, that "specialized reduction-in-force procedures needed for the National Guard technicians made the module impractical." Basically, each department needed to weigh its cuts differently to avoid gutting essential personnel. Despite several software updates since then, Wired reported, the tool remained subject to errors, sources told Reuters, requiring most federal agencies to continue conducting firings manually rather than risk work stoppages or other negative outcomes from sloppy firings.

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On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced plans to rescind and replace a Biden-era rule regulating the export of high-end AI accelerator chips worldwide, Bloomberg and Reuters reported.

A Department of Commerce spokeswoman told Reuters that officials found the previous framework "overly complex, overly bureaucratic, and would stymie American innovation" and pledged to create "a much simpler rule that unleashes American innovation and ensures American AI dominance."

The Biden administration issued the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion in January during its final week in office. The regulation represented the last salvo of a four-year effort to control global access to so-called "advanced" AI chips (such as GPUs made by Nvidia), with a focus on restricting China's ability to obtain tech that could enhance its military capabilities.

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The Tariff Manager tool will let creators add extra charges to fully funded projects.

Deep-sea mining could unleash clouds of debris that threaten a mysterious, vital ecosystem we barely understand.

The Primary School will shut down in the summer of 2026.

Tariffs have people concerned about the price of cars.

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Nintendo says Switch 2 preorders won't go live in the U.S. on April 9, citing President Trump's newly revealed tariffs.Read More

Haugh’s firing has seemingly caught senior lawmakers by surprise

US experts who work in artificial intelligence fields seem to have a much rosier outlook on AI than the rest of us.

In a survey comparing views of a nationally representative sample (5,410) of the general public to a sample of 1,013 AI experts, the Pew Research Center found that "experts are far more positive and enthusiastic about AI than the public" and "far more likely than Americans overall to believe AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years" (56 percent vs. 17 percent). And perhaps most glaringly, 76 percent of experts believe these technologies will benefit them personally rather than harm them (15 percent).

The public does not share this confidence. Only about 11 percent of the public says that "they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life." They're much more likely (51 percent) to say they're more concerned than excited, whereas only 15 percent of experts shared that pessimism. Unlike the majority of experts, just 24 percent of the public thinks AI will be good for them, whereas nearly half the public anticipates they will be personally harmed by AI.

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Last week, Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Trump administration would hack off nearly a quarter of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees critical agencies including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The downsizing includes pushing out about 10,000 full-time employees through early retirements, deferred resignations, and other efforts. Another 10,000 will be laid off in a brutal restructuring, bringing the total HHS workforce from 82,000 to 62,000.

"This will be a painful period," Kennedy said in a video announcement last week. Early yesterday morning, the pain began.

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